SparkNotes: Lolita: Character List Character List Plot Overview Analysis of Major Characters Humbert Humbert - The narrator and protagonist of Lolita. Humbert is an erudite European intellectual with an obsessive love for nymphets and a history of mental illness. He manages to seduce the reader with his gift for beautiful language, but he is nonetheless capable of rape and murder. Humbert, despite his knowledge of the world, becomes self-aware only toward the end of the novel, when he realizes he has ruined Lolita’s childhood. He writes the story of Lolita from his prison cell, where he awaits trial for murder. However, he dies of heart failure soon after Lolita’s death. Read an in-depth analysis of Humbert Humbert. Dolores (Lolita) Haze - The novel’s eponymous nymphet. An adolescent, she is seductive, flirtatious, and capricious, and she initially finds herself attracted to Humbert, competing with her mother for his affections. However, when his demands become more pressing, and as she spends more time with children her own age, she begins to tire of him.

Humbert attempts to educate her, but she remains attached to American popular culture and unimpressed with his cultured ideas. Eventually, she runs off with Clare Quilty, but he abandons her after she refuses to participate in child pornography. She eventually marries Dick Schiller and dies in childbirth. Clare Quilty - Humbert’s shadow and double. Quilty is a successful playwright and child pornographer who takes a liking to Lolita from an early age. He follows her throughout the story, ultimately kidnapping her away from Humbert. Though Lolita is in love with him, he eventually tires of her. Nabokov conceals Quilty’s importance to the story until nearly the end. Quilty is amoral, highly literate, and completely corrupt. Read an in-depth analysis of Clare Quilty. Charlotte Haze - Lolita’s mother and Humbert’s wife. A middle-class woman who aspires to be cultured and sophisticated, Charlotte never manages to be much more than a bourgeois housewife. Her relationship with Lolita is strained throughout the novel. Charlotte worships Humbert and stays blind to his pedophilia and lust for her daughter until she discovers his diary. She dies soon after in a car accident.

Read an in-depth analysis of Charlotte Haze. Annabel Leigh - Humbert’s childhood love. Annabel and her family visit Humbert’s father’s hotel as tourists. Despite having many physical encounters, Humbert and Annabel are unable to consummate their adolescent love. She later dies of typhus in Corfu. Humbert remains obsessed with her memory until he meets Lolita. Valeria - Humbert’s first wife, whom he married to cure himself of his addiction to nymphets. Humbert finds Valeria intellectually inferior and often bullies her. When he plans to move to America, Valeria leaves him to marry a Russian taxi driver. Valeria and her husband die in California years later. Jean Farlow - A friend of Charlotte’s and the wife of John Farlow. John and Jean Farlow are among Charlotte and Humbert’s few friends. After Charlotte’s death, she secretly kisses Humbert. She eventually dies of cancer. John Farlow - A friend of Charlotte’s, married to Jean. He handles the Haze estate after Charlotte dies, but he eventually relegates his duties to a lawyer because of the complicated nature of the case. After Jean dies, he marries someone else and lives an adventurous life in South America.

Dick Schiller - Lolita’s husband. Dick is a simple, good-natured working man who is deaf in one ear, Dick has no idea about the sexual relationship between Humbert and Lolita, believing Humbert to simply be Lolita’s father. Dick receives a job offer in Alaska, where he plans to take Lolita, whom he calls Dolly. Rita - An alcoholic whom Humbert lives with after he loses Lolita. Toward the end of their affair, Rita has many encounters with the law and becomes paranoid that Humbert will leave her. Humbert finds her comforting but regards her as simple-minded. Mona - Lolita’s favorite friend at the Beardsley School for Girls. Mona has already had an affair with a marine and appears to be flirting with Humbert. However, she refuses to divulge any of Lolita’s secrets. She helps Lolita lie to Humbert when Humbert discovers that Lolita has been missing her piano lessons. Gaston Grodin - A plump, beloved French professor at Beardsley College. Gaston is popular in the community and helps Humbert find his house and settle into Beardsley.

They often play chess together, but Humbert thinks him a poor scholar and not very smart. Gaston also has a predilection for young boys, which no one in Beardsley seems to notice. Mrs. Pratt - The headmistress of the Beardsley School for Girls. Humbert is unimpressed with Pratt’s emphasis on social skills and her resistance to traditional academic approaches. She calls Humbert to her office to discuss Lolita’s disciplinary problems and expresses concern that Lolita is not developing sexually. Ivor Quilty - Clare Quilty’s uncle, a dentist. Dreamy and well liked, he thinks of his nephew with kind indulgence. He has been friends with the Haze family all his life. Humbert finds Clare Quilty by visiting Ivor at his office. Monique - A French nymphet prostitute. Initially, Humbert is attracted to her nymphet qualities and begins an affair with her. However, he becomes disillusioned by her maturation and abruptly ends the affair. John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. - The author of the foreword and the editor of Humbert’s memoir. Shirley Holmes - Lolita’s summer-camp director.

Charlie - Shirley Holmes’s son, who also works at the camp. Lolita has her first sexual experiences with him, but she is unimpressed by his manners. Later Humbert discovers that he has been killed in Korea. Barbara - Lolita’s friend at camp. Barbara has sex with Charlie in the bushes while Lolita stands guard. Finally, Barbara convinces Lolita to “try it,” which she does. Vivian Darkbloom - Clare Quilty’s female writing partner. Lolita confuses Humbert by telling him that Vivian is a man and Clare is a woman. After Quilty’s death, Vivian writes Quilty’s biography. “Vivian Darkbloom” is an anagram for “Vladimir Nabokov.” John (Jack) Windmuller - The lawyer to whom John Farlow entrusts the Haze estate. He handles the estate but wants nothing to do with the sordidness surrounding the impending trial. Frederick Beale, Jr. - The driver of the car that kills Charlotte.

More Help 'Lolita' by Vladimir Nabokov - Book Review Tips See: 10 Step Book Report Plot Summary for Lolita Lolita is the fictional memoir of Humbert Humbert, and it is named after the character who becomes the object of Humbert's twisted love and fascination. The story traces the growing obsession of an older man with an adolescent girl. As the relationship between Dolores (Lolita) and Humbert develops, the reader sees the dangerous nature of obsession and the terrible consequences to the victim. Humbert is a complex character; the reader will find him to be devious, disturbed, and deceptive, but also may find the character to be brilliant and strangely endearing. Early on, readers may feel sympathy for the character upon learning that he lost his first love at the age of thirteen. This loss, it is suggested impacts his later attraction to young girls. continue reading below our video 4 Tips for Improving Test Performance Humbert meets Deloris, also known as Lolita, when he rents a room in a house owned by her mother, Charlotte Haze. Charlotte is a widow, and she eventually falls in love with Humbert.

Because Humbert is obsessed with Lolita, he eventually marries Charlotte to stay close to the girl. Charlotte discovers her husband's obsession with Lolita when she reads his journal. She flies into a rage and leaves the house, and is killed by a passing automobile. Her death leaves the young Lolita in the clutches of Humbert. However, Lolita learns to be deceptive and manipulative in her own right, and manages to disappear with her own love interest. Setting The events of the novel Lolita take place through the late 1940s and early 1950s. The story begins in the south of France and then moves to America where it ranges through a series of nondescript towns. Writing About Lolita If you are writing a book report , it will be necessary to explore some of the significant conflicts and questions from the story. These are sample questions that you may want to discuss in depth as you write your book report. Why might we consider Humbert Humbert the protagonist of the story when he is so obviously evil? What significance can be attributed to the many games played in the novel? How does Dolores change throughout the story? Is Dolores responsible in any way for her fate?

Is Charlotte a good mother to Dolores? How does Quilty act as a foil to Humbert? Possible First Sentences Lolita is an excellent example of post-modern literature. The forward of Lolita gives the novel’s lurid subject matter legitimacy. In Lolita Nabokov uses language to seduce his readers just as Humbert uses it to seduce the women of the novel. Nabokov exploits and degrades the concept of love in the novel Lolita. See: Quotes from Lolita Characters Humbert Humbert: the protagonist of the novel, H.H. is a well educated European with a history of mental instability and a fondness for adolescent girls. Humbert becomes obsessed with the 12 year old daughter of his landlady, and all ensuing events spring from this passionate fixation. Dolores Haze (Lolita): the ultimate victim of the novel, Lolita is the object of H.H.’s pedophilia. Dolores is kidnapped by H.H. and is stripped of her childhood. She becomes a precocious and manipulative girl who uses her power over H.H. to satisfy her childlike desires. Charlotte Haze: Dolores’ mother and Humbert’s landlady and wife.

Charlotte discovers Humbert’s passion for her daughter and then dies in an accident removing the only aspect of protection in Dolores’ life. Clare Quilty: the novel’s villain, Quilty is a playwright and, like H.H., a pedophile. He represents a shadowy reflection of Humbert, embodying a more overtly evil manner of seduction. Lolita Turns 60 | New Republic Lolita Turns 60 By Lolita Book Club December 15, 2015 Though Vladimir Nabokov was living in America when he wrote Lolita, the novel was first published in Paris in 1955—by Olympia Press, whose list included many pornographic titles. On the sixtieth anniversary of Lolita’s first publication, we asked ten writers to reflect on their changing experiences with the novel in the course of their reading lives. Each day for five days, we are posting two reflections, each revisiting a section of pages from the book—we are using Vintage’s 2005 edition, a complete, unexpurgated text. 1. By Alexandra Kleeman, pp.

3-32 At first glance, Humbert Humbert’s narrative appears to begin in direct address: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, which is a fitting start for one of the most notorious love stories in literature. (What, after all, is more romance-like than calling out for the absent beloved?) But Humbert’s address leads nowhere. My sin, my soul, he continues, leaving the reader uncertain whether he refers to the girl or to himself, or to the latter in the guise of the former. Humbert isn’t speaking to Lolita at all: he uses her instead as material for thought, something to give shape to his speech. Lolita’s allure has more to do with Humbert’s backstory than with any nymph-like nature of her own. That the eponymous girl makes only a fleeting appearance within the first thirty pages of Lolita offers a perplexing answer to the question of whether any male author—even an exceptionally skilled one—can craft an authentic female character. On NPR’s list of the “ 100 Best Fictional Characters since 1900 ”, Humbert Humbert is ranked third, Lolita fourteenth.

Fourteenth seems generous, given that it is so difficult to perceive Lolita through the haze of Humbert’s elocution (or is it invention?). Once when I was twenty-four, I went on a date with a man a year older who had never kissed anyone before. When I showed up at his apartment for dinner— a sweet Riesling, green salad with no dressing, roasted chicken with no skin because he disliked the alternating crispiness and flabbiness of it, the goosebumps on its surface—it was obvious that he intended to change that, via me. After we ate he let me choose from a small stack of sci-fi DVDs that he owned. When, ineluctably, he kissed me, his grip was too tight on my body, as though he had expected someone smaller. It was like being marched through someone’s private idea of a perfect night, a night where I was the center but one that had curiously little to do with me at all—all of which is to say that in an equation of desire, the object of desire can be integral and incidental at the same time.

It could be said that in these early pages Nabokov signals his intent to craft a more honest portrayal of a female character than any before: A portrayal in absentia, one which has the reader peering anxiously through the gaps in Humbert’s account for glimpses of the incidental girl, the one who resists appropriation by narrator and reader alike. Sue Lyon and James Mason in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 version of Lolita. ullstein bild/Getty 2. By Josephine Livingstone, pp. 33-62 Humbert Humbert has left a polar expedition, briefly become insane, and, finally, arrived to stay at a Mr. McCoo’s American house only to find that it has burned down. Instead, he must lodge with local Mrs. Haze. “What could I do?” Humbert says.

“I pushed the bell button.” The first perfect sentence in the book happens on page 57 of Vintage’s anniversary edition, when our narrator is renting a room in the Haze household for an “ominously” low price: I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, “impartial sympathy.” What are we to observe? That the man who we have already heard to possess “a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile” is in fact “careful, chaste.” Ah, but! With the mention of lawyer and impartial sympathy we are recast as juror, and so reminded that the relationship between narrator and reader is no innocent one. Remember the page before, this sentence says, while it pretends to ask for forgiveness. We are not reading about events, but events “if viewed” from the jail cell, looking back. The scene he has warned us about is simple and grotesque.

Humbert Humbert sits in “white pajamas” with “a lilac design on the back.” He is “like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens.” A predator in floral sleepwear, he waits for his opportunity to snag Lolita for the first time. “The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars.” More perfect sentences. More reminders that we are being forced to consume the sublime as a kind of salad dressing soaking a horrible banal middle-aged man in pajamas. A little while later, he has “crushed out against [Dolores Hazes’] left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.” Later on that same page: “I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm done.” And you, learned reader—you have participated in the scene! With impartial sympathy, I hope. Dominique Swain and Jeremy Irons in Adrian Lynne’s 1997 version of Lolita.Getty 3. By Doreen St. Felix, pp. 62-93 Charlotte Haze knows.

I am on my tenth or so read of Lolita, across as many years and stages of womanhood, and I am beginning to see her agenda. Perhaps not at the moment Humbert cast his gloriously vile gaze on her daughter Dolores—so obsessed she was with his swarthy European look—but she knows what he’s after well before she finds the scholar’s diary. The most pathetic mother character in fiction, then, might have at least been evil. Consider the Humberts’ summer without Dolores. Charlotte sends Dolores to summer camp, leaving Humbert writhing in the child’s bedroom. She sends him a letter by way of the maid, where she declares a succession of funny things: “If you decided to stay, if I found you at home...the fact of your remaining would only mean one thing; that you want me as much as I do you: as a lifelong mate; and that you are ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.” Charlotte’s disdain for her child runs deeper than useless jealousy; for Dolores, both her mother and soon-to-be stepfather have uses.

Charlotte baits Humbert with Dolores; he says yes; she joins him as a Humbert. Dolores feigns unconcern. A summer of laughable seduction ensues. The new wife spends the hot months awkwardly affecting girlish coquetterie to summon her husband’s interest. Charlotte looses her breasts on the beach to ply Humbert, while he dreams about Dolores’ blond legs turning brown. Charlotte suggests they take a lover’s trip to England, away from that which he cannot be away from; he fantasizes about drugging both mother and nymphet for two different, related reasons. If Charlotte is evil, what’s worse is she is a poor tactician. “Little Lo, I’m afraid, does not enter the picture at all, at all,” Mrs. Humbert explains. She will send their daughter off to boarding school to receive “some sound religious training” and then “Beardsley College.” Reeling, Mr. Humbert plans impotently to drown her. She’ll die—his wives always die—but not that way. Charlotte’s knowledge of Humbert’s predilection was perhaps incomplete.

But I submit Charlotte understands that making him love her must involve dangling her child in front of him and then snatching her away. To disappear Dolores, Charlotte says her name less. In turn, her husband thinks her nickname and all its diminutives, Lolita, incessantly. That was Lolita’s predictable influence on language, too: Lolita came to be a name for what are called sexually precocious girls but doting, pedophillic men did not come to be called Humberts. Lolita book covers from around the world. 4. By Anna Wiener, pp. 93-123 “There is a hotel I remember, Enchanted Hunters, quaint, isn’t it?” Charlotte Haze says with ardor at the close of Chapter 21. “And the food is a dream.” Charlotte and Humbert Humbert’s romantic getaway never comes to pass. The closest approximation to actualizing a fantasy is its documentation; Humbert is a diligent scribe, and Charlotte, an industrious snoop.

Despite the deployment of every diarist’s most unoriginal cover story—“The notes you found were fragments of a novel”— Charlotte is horrified by Humbert’s betrayal and his salacious intentions for her daughter, Dolores/Lolita. She races from the house and into the path of an oncoming car. Exit Charlotte; enter Papa Humbert, consummate caretaker. Master of the long con, he weaves a fictitious alibi for Charlotte (emergency surgery; imaginary hospital; eventual death), and travels to collect Lolita from camp, bearing lurid gifts and lewder fantasies. Humbert and Lolita embark on a uniquely American adventure: a road trip. They bounce along the highway, pulling onto the shoulder to kiss. Navigating the car through small-town darkness, Humbert’s narration grows increasingly tumescent as The Enchanted Hunters remains out of reach. The Enchanted Hunters has a quintessential sad-motel aesthetic, its gestural romance and girlish decor the antithesis of sex: floral carpets, chenille bedspread, ruffled lampshades.

The dining room is “spacious and pretentious,” with “maudlin murals depicting enchanted hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of pallid animals, dryads and trees.” Over dinner, Humbert enchants Lolita via purple sleeping pill (“Oh, how fast the magic potion worked!”) and they return to their room, with its omnipresent mirrors. “There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, a closet door with mirror, a bathroom door ditto, a blue-dark window, a reflected bed there,” Humbert writes. “I’ve been such a disgusting girl,” Lolita says, passing out on the bed; you can picture the child bewitched in slumber, her wilted body repeated across each silvered surface. This panopticon is designed for the predator: his prey has nowhere to hide. The food, as Charlotte promised, is a dream. James Mason and Sue Lyon in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film.ullstein bild /Getty 5. By Moira Weigel, pp. 123-154 Lolita is the story of a doomed chase.

More specifically, it is a story about the fate of a European tradition that understands desire this way. Since the beginning, Humbert has been setting himself up as an heir to Dante and Petrarch. When this section begins, Humbert Humbert is killing time downstairs at the Enchanted Hunter; Lo is locked in room 342, lightly drugged by a sleeping pill. Humbert is giving it half an hour to do its work. Yet, he remains nervous. As he tells us, “lust is always unsure.” In Chapter 30, instead of simply describing their days at the Enchanted Hunter, Humbert sketches an elaborate emblem in the subjunctive. “Had I been a painter… this is what I might have thought up… There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower...” Counterfactual on counterfactual. We know from the beginning that this fantasy, like the transient beauty Dante and Petrarch celebrate, is living on borrowed time. In this section, the old, and often irritatingly erudite voice of the Euro-cosmopolite who in so many ways resembles Nabokov collides with the vastness of a new and expanding America.

For all the literary allusions that Humbert heaps on her, Nabokov presents Lo herself as an utterly average “teen.” She has conventional crushes; her lips are red, “like licked candy”; she is constantly reading movie magazines. Lolita, the book, is not immune. The plot relies on a machinery of improbable coincidences and violent actions that would fit perfectly in a Hollywood melodrama. When I was a few years older than Lo is supposed to be, I adored Lolita for its word games. I longed to be as sophisticated as its narrator, smart enough to get his private jokes. Twice the age now, I am struck rereading it how many fancy words I must have learned here first. Limpid! Alembic! Concupiscence! Today, my feelings about Lolita are more ambivalent. Not because it celebrates sex abuse but because it fervently believes in the autonomy of art from life. Nabokov insists that a private, even hermetic experience of literature is enough to redeem the horrors of real history—the fallen continent Humbert fled. I disagree.

Yet the skill with which Lolita creates and sustains its double vision, still impresses and affects me deeply, even as the Old World that produced Humbert shrinks ever smaller in the rearview mirror. Customers at a London bookshop read the controversial bestseller, which was published in England in 1957.Keystone/Getty 6. By Hannah Gold, pp. 154-183 When I first read Lolita I was in high school and thought that what made it “great literature” is that it forces the reader to identify with such a low and frightening character as its narrator Humbert Humbert. Not fully understanding why, I quickly became obsessed with the book—making lists of every word I didn’t know, writing a short story about a man who’s sexually attracted to his pet rabbit. Soon “lepidoptery” called to mind liver-spotted men and lechery, especially since I never used the word. Now it seems to me a book in which every sense except sympathy is aroused. Nabokov’s frantic, flourishing imagery is the flattened gas pedal of style. Read the words out loud and you’ll start stumbling over them, or into them—anyway, making roadkill out of them.

Nowhere is this need for speed better realized than in these pages of the book that recount the year that Hum and Lo spend tripping across America. Humbert has just finished explaining to Lolita, with surgical cruelty, that she can either get in his car or become a ward of the state. From there, during “150 days of actual motion” and “200 days of interpolated standstills,” the two travel around the entire country, from Texas to California to Kansas, in no particular order. Along the way Humbert examines his legal status, which changes by the state and therefore by the day; in Alabama he’s a kidnapper, in Missouri he’s a legal guardian (he’s a sex offender everywhere). There are pit stops at inns, with soda fountains and swimming pools. In California, Humbert gives Lolita tennis lessons. They go to the movies some two hundred times, where they watch news reels, Westerns, musicals. In the summer Humbert comes close to getting caught after forcing himself on Lolita outdoors, along a mountain pass.

He suffers and grumbles that he will never be able to peer into Lolita’s innards, “her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.” Apart from this Humbert sees everything America has to offer, or at least catalogues it. His motivation is to escape being seen anywhere for too long. Above all, these pages are solidly some of the best in the book because they contain Humbert’s reference to himself as a “Humburger.” It’s hilarious, brief, totally unrelatable. 7. By Hannah Rosefield, pp. 183-215 “I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics,” says Humbert. Short of putting the relevant sections of Lolita into italics, Nabokov couldn’t do much more to tell us to keep our eyes open as the novel shifts from romance to mystery. The noirish details accumulate: hurried telephone calls, ambiguous names, a gun, a raincoat, a series of coincidences and motels. Yet I always hurry over these details, ignoring the clues that could help me solve Dolly’s disappearance.

Though I don’t always have the best head for thrillers, I suspect that even the most promising Philip Marlowe-in-training would find it hard to pay attention to the coincidence of a long-gone hotel having the same name as a school play, when there’s the endless distraction of Lolita herself, morphing from child to stroppy, secretive teen. Who can think about the identity of the playwright—“some old woman, Clare Something”—when Dolly Haze is coming down the street on her bicycle, chaotic, graceful, “one hand dreaming in her print flowered lap”? When there’s the gabby stupidity of headmistress Mrs. Pratt, baring her dentures at Humbert, wondering if anyone has yet taught Dolly about sex? When we see Humbert handing out dollars and dimes for sexual favors before right away prizing the money from Lolita’s fingers, believing that keeping her penniless will keep her his prisoner? Reading Lolita, missing all the signs, I find myself not only as enchanted but as foolish, as scornful, as oblivious as Humbert himself.

A poster for the Italian release of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Lolita, starring Sue Lyon. Movie Poster Image Art / Getty Images 8. By Gemma Sieff pp. 215-247 Things are ramping up for Humbert Humbert (or Otto Otto, or Mesmer Mesmer, or Lambert Lambert) and his spoil-of-war as they wander west. Tailed by a convertible he calls the Red Yak, HH is losing touch with reality. If he can’t shake the guy or determine who he is by aggressively interrogating the fickle little traitor in the passenger seat, he will try looking up his license plate. He copies it out only to find its digits mangled by “a child’s hand.” They drive on, HH pulls over, “Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone.” It’s one of the few moments of non-sexual violence between them: the kind of blow a brute bestows a woman. Among other details in these chapters it signals that Lo is no longer a perfect nymphet.

At 14 she is approaching the end of her nymphancy and HH will lose her one way or another. HH’s mania is making him see not double but fractal. “Perhaps, I was losing my mind.” Perhaps! He regrets allowing Lolita to participate in school dramas, realizing that pretending on the stage may (must) have taught her to pretend with him. The magic of her tennis game is in its sweetness, the spin-free sincerity of her lovely strokes, the absence of drive or a desire to win. HH’s own serve can be tricky, but he keeps it simple so as to prolong the game. “Who would upset such a lucid dear? Did I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen?” Those questions ache with nostalgia. The 8 of vaccination is years old. She is only fourteen and already fourteen. Lolita gets sick, and HH has to relinquish her to the hospital and its prying busybodies.

He brings her a ridiculous stack of books when what she wants is all of her clothes, so that she can make a run for it, and with the help of impotent “uncle” Gustave, she does. HH foams at the mouth when he finds out, but keeps it together enough to stay out of jail for now. Vladimir Nabokov in Rome while working on the screenplay for Lolita.Keystone/Getty Images 9. By Moira Donegan, pp. 247-281 With Lolita gone, Humbert descends into madness. Destroyed by his grief, he declines to describe the years that immediately followed Lolita’s disappearance. “The general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life’s full flight,” he says, “and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.” During this dark period Humbert meets Rita, an adult woman “twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine,” who he encounters jovially drunk at a roadside bar. They spend the next two years as an amicable, shoulder-slapping couple, driving from motel to motel in a happily drunken montage.

His account of Rita’s arrests and infidelities in various highway towns is brief but offers an uncanny counterweight to Humbert’s relationship with Lolita. Here we see him again careening about a vice-filled and mournful America, but this time the affair is only ordinarily sordid, the sort of thing that happens between two consenting adults who do not try very hard to be kind to one another. The emotional climax comes later: Humbert receives a letter from Lolita herself. She is married, pregnant, and needs money. He tracks her down to a glamourless rural town, where the 17-year-old Lolita is living with an anodyne young veteran. The reunion is, as such things must be, a disappointment. “Couple of inches taller,” Humbert recounts. “Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up hairdo, new ears. . . . The moment, the death I had kept conjuring up for three years was as simple as a bit of dry wood.” He’s still in love, though he can’t contain his repulsion at her adult body and drab surroundings.

Humbert gives her a check for ten times what she asked for, and, already knowing her answer, asks her to come away with him. It is perhaps Nabokov’s most arresting accomplishment that her reply contains genuine pity, genuine compassion. “‘No,’ she said. ‘No, honey, no,’” Humbert writes: “She had never called me honey before.” 10. By Lidija Haas, pp. 281-309 Some of Lolita’s most poignant moments are crammed into the last few pages, where its tangle of the moral and the aesthetic, the wrenchingly sad and the gleefully grotesque, reaches a peak. Here Humbert has what some have wanted to see as partial epiphanies: the voices of children playing prompt him to realize the enormity of having stolen Dolly’s childhood; recalling a chance remark of hers, he vaguely senses that she is in fact a real person with a mind—“that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me.” Yet we can’t take any of this seriously as a redemption.

It’s only a little less farcical than that other wrestling match he has with himself in this section, the showdown with his double, Quilty. For all his hangdog expressions of regret, Humbert has his claws in the girl and the reader till the last moment, keeping himself and her alive and locked together via “my writing hand.” In the “refuge of art,” she can’t get away from him and neither can we: “this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.” Some readers have always worried about how much of HH there was in VN (sure, it’s art, they say, but why so many little girls?). That line of thought doesn’t lead anywhere especially interesting. But you could say that Nabokov does use Humbert to explore himself in one important sense: What does it mean to have, and employ, such powers, to make worlds out of words that can feel so much more vivid than the real one (and make us feel more for imaginary Lolita than for her real-life prototype Sally Horner , confined by Humbert to a parenthetical aside)?

Is someone who can conjure such things doing the rest of us an ethical as well as aesthetic service, or is that virtuosity more like a dangerous perversion in itself? Nabokov would always want to have it both ways. Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) What Was The Decisive Factor? You will receive an email shortly to confirm your email address. Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) What Was The Decisive Factor? title details and video sharing options now playing Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) What Was The Decisive Factor? Professor Humbert (James Mason) is considering an offer of lodging from Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters) when he meets her daughter (Sue Lyon, title character) in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962, from the Vladimir Nabokov novel. View the TCMDb entry for Lolita (1962) share video Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) What Was The... Professor Humbert (James Mason) is considering an offer of...

Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) What Was... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) What Was The Decisive Factor? Professor Humbert (James Mason) is considering an offer of lodging from Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters) when he meets her daughter (Sue Lyon, title character) in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962, from the Vladimir Nabokov novel.> An aging intellectual becomes obsessed with a young teenage... An aging intellectual becomes obsessed... Lolita - (Original Trailer) An aging intellectual becomes obsessed with a young teenage girl when he becomes a boarder in her mother's house in Lolita (1962).> Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Roman Ping Pong Professor Humbert (James Mason) finds writer Quilty (Peter... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Roman Ping...

Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Roman Ping Pong Professor Humbert (James Mason) finds writer Quilty (Peter Sellers) in his unkempt rented mansion in what amounts to the prologue to Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962, from the Vladimir Nabokov novel.> Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Did I Do That? College town busybody Charlotte (Shelley Winters) can't... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Did I Do... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Did I Do That? College town busybody Charlotte (Shelley Winters) can't resist approaching the minor celebrity at the dance, TV writer Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), who can't recall meeting her, in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962.> Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Acute Observation Lodger professor Humbert (James Mason) is getting academic,... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Acute...

Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Acute Observation Lodger professor Humbert (James Mason) is getting academic, masking his lust for Lolita (Sue Lyon), until she's summoned by her mom Charlotte (Shelley Winters), who soon delivers unwelcome news in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962. > Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Two Normal Guys Diabolical Quilty (Peter Sellers) obscures his face and... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Two Normal... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Two Normal Guys Diabolical Quilty (Peter Sellers) obscures his face and poses as a cop, contriving a chance encounter with Humbert (James Mason), whom we know, some years later, will shoot him, in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962, from Vladimir Nabokov's novel and screenplay.> Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Other Young Marrieds Charlotte (Shelley Winters) takes a call from her teenage...

Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Other... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Other Young Marrieds Charlotte (Shelley Winters) takes a call from her teenage daughter (the title character) during an awkward post-honeymoon snuggle with her irritated lodger-turned-husband, Professor Humbert (James Mason) in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962.> Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Roman Ping Pong You will receive an email shortly to confirm your email address. Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Roman Ping Pong title details and video sharing options now playing Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Roman Ping Pong Professor Humbert (James Mason) finds writer Quilty (Peter Sellers) in his unkempt rented mansion in what amounts to the prologue to Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962, from the Vladimir Nabokov novel.

View the TCMDb entry for Lolita (1962) share video Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Roman Ping Pong Professor Humbert (James Mason) finds writer Quilty (Peter... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Roman Ping... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Roman Ping Pong Professor Humbert (James Mason) finds writer Quilty (Peter Sellers) in his unkempt rented mansion in what amounts to the prologue to Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962, from the Vladimir Nabokov novel.> An aging intellectual becomes obsessed with a young teenage... An aging intellectual becomes obsessed... Lolita - (Original Trailer) An aging intellectual becomes obsessed with a young teenage girl when he becomes a boarder in her mother's house in Lolita (1962).> Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) What Was The... Professor Humbert (James Mason) is considering an offer of... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) What Was...

Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) What Was The Decisive Factor? Professor Humbert (James Mason) is considering an offer of lodging from Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters) when he meets her daughter (Sue Lyon, title character) in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962, from the Vladimir Nabokov novel.> Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Did I Do That? College town busybody Charlotte (Shelley Winters) can't... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Did I Do... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Did I Do That? College town busybody Charlotte (Shelley Winters) can't resist approaching the minor celebrity at the dance, TV writer Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), who can't recall meeting her, in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962.> Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Acute Observation Lodger professor Humbert (James Mason) is getting academic,... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Acute...

Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Acute Observation Lodger professor Humbert (James Mason) is getting academic, masking his lust for Lolita (Sue Lyon), until she's summoned by her mom Charlotte (Shelley Winters), who soon delivers unwelcome news in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962. > Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Two Normal Guys Diabolical Quilty (Peter Sellers) obscures his face and... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Two Normal... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Two Normal Guys Diabolical Quilty (Peter Sellers) obscures his face and poses as a cop, contriving a chance encounter with Humbert (James Mason), whom we know, some years later, will shoot him, in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962, from Vladimir Nabokov's novel and screenplay.> Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Other Young Marrieds Charlotte (Shelley Winters) takes a call from her teenage...

Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Other... Lolita (1962) -- (Movie Clip) Other Young Marrieds Charlotte (Shelley Winters) takes a call from her teenage daughter (the title character) during an awkward post-honeymoon snuggle with her irritated lodger-turned-husband, Professor Humbert (James Mason) in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, 1962.> Lolita Study Guide - Course Hero Genre: Fiction Perspective and Narrator: Except for the framing device in the fictional foreword, Lolita is narrated in the first person by sexual predator Humbert Humbert. Humbert is an unreliable narrator who manipulates his audience as he tries to justify his obsession with a 12-year-old girl as romantic love. Tense: Lolita is narrated in the past tense. About the Title: "Lolita" is the nickname the narrator gives to the 12-year-old girl with whom he is obsessed.

Characters Lolita Audiobook | Vladimir Nabokov | Audible.com View full details > One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Greg says: next page Audible Editor Reviews Why we think it's Essential: Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons portrayed this novel's nymphet-obsessed professor in a filmed adaptation, so it is not surprising he is able to negotiate Nabokov's dense, refined, and fiery prose with great facility. Irons' mastery reminds me of a conductor who studies a score for years and then knows innately how to communicate it to an audience, note-perfect from beginning to end.

If you're looking for a fine example of great literature that comes across better in audio than it does on the printed page, you've found it. Corey Thrasher Publisher's Summary When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the 20th century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story that is shocking in its beauty and tenderness. Awe and exhilaration, along with heartbreak and mordant wit, abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. But most of all, it is a meditation on love - as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation. (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

What the Critics Say "Lolita is an authentic work of art which compels our immediate response and serious reflection, a revealing and indispensable comedy of horrors." (San Francisco Chronicle) "Language is essential to Lolita, and Mr. Irons captures Humbert's voice perfectly. In the Random House audiobook, he read the novel with a sensitivity to the language that conveys all of Nabokov's humor, passion, and lyricism." (The New York Times) More from the same Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov | Teen Book Review of classic and fiction Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Image Credit: Amazon.com Buy online and support Teen Ink: As a child, the experience of reading a brilliant book was a simple one- I would become enraptured by the book I was reading, torn between trying to extrapolate my reading process for as long as possible, and wanting to devour it all at once like it was a chocolate bar. The characters would become my friends, and I would feel content to inhabit the world of the book for as long as I could.

My experience reading “Lolita,” often hailed as the greatest novel in the English language, was so far removed from my childhood reading experiences that it doubled the poignancy of Nabokov’s novel. Let me start by saying that this novel was, without a doubt, brilliant. Nabokov’s mastery, one might even call it wizardry, of the English language, is incomparable. The narrative is more poetry than prose, and there is something exultant about Humbert Humbert, our “protagonist’s” voice. It was as bizarre as it was wonderful, like watching the writhing of some newly discovered exotic snake. Beneath the layers of artistry, however, was the uncomfortable reality of the content.

The novel, in case you were not aware, is presented as the memoirs of Humbert Humbert, a European literature professor in his late 30s, whose sexually unfulfilled childhood romance has left him obsessed with a certain class of pre-adolescent girls, referred to by the narrator, as “nymphets.” When he encounters the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, whom he names “Lolita” in his head, his obsession turn solely to her, and, after becoming her stepfather, he begins a sexual relationship with her. The novel’s opening line demonstrates the almost jarring clash between the poeticism of Humbert’s language and the horrific actions about which he speaks. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” The novel opens on this exuberant and impassioned declaration, and the energy only mounts from here. I was enraptured, fascinated, delighted by the language, but at the same time, I felt deeply disturbed.

The novel forced me to live inside the head of Humbert Humbert, the most unreliable of all unreliable narrators, and listen to accounts of his depravity. What disturbed me more than the acts themselves was the fact that listening to Humbert, I almost agreed with him. His voice lulled me into a trance and carried me on some kind of wave, it felt like listening to music. But then I would realise that he was talking about committing acts of grotesque paraphilia- incest, paedophilia, rape- and here I was sympathising with him. Other times, his demeanour and obsessiveness would terrify me outright. One night, I had to put the book down and cry silently, because I was so tired of inhabiting the depraved recesses of Humbert’s mind. Then I went straight back to reading. Oh yes, Nabokov, who had used every tool in the shed to create as debauched and perverted novel as possible, had done so in a way that had me hooked.

Some of the most heartbreaking parts of the novel were the ones where Nabokov let the layers of heady language fall away, describing Lolita crying herself to sleep, or Humbert’s realisation of how completely he had ravaged a girl’s childhood. These moments felt like you had suddenly come up for air after a long period of submersion- they were sharp, incisive, painful, and suddenly the smokescreen of the “sexually provocative young girl” that “Lolita” has now come to mean, blew away and left you with what there really was- a madman and a child rape victim, each pathetic and desolate in his or her own way. Humbert Humbert is never a character I will want as a friend, and I’ll admit, I cried a little more after finishing Lolita. My heart had broken into 3 pieces. One for Lo, who I felt so sad for, this poor child who has been glorified into some kind of “kink” icon. Another for Humbert, depraved paedophile, linguistic magician, who I could not help but pity. And a third piece for myself.

I was exhausted by and afraid of the time I had been held hostage by Humbert’s mind, of the manipulations and mirages my mind had subjected itself to, and I felt like I had survived a shipwreck. That’s never how I felt when I finished an Enid Blyton or a Horrible Histories or any other staple childhood favourite. I suppose that as I navigated this world of a child’s loss of innocence in the most extreme and awful sense, I finally came to terms with my own- a far lesser, much more natural loss of innocence, but a palpable loss nonetheless. This is a novel you have to read. Nabokov is an indisputable genius, whose love-letter to the English language cannot fail to thrill you, alarm you, disgust you, enthrall you. I won’t say you’ll enjoy this novel- I certainly did not enjoy it- but it will be unlike any other reading experience you have ever had, and although it’s dangerous, I recommend everyone try it at least once. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov - Top 10 Racy Novels - TIME Top 10 Racy Novels By Josh SanburnWednesday, Mar.

28, 2012 Vintage Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 classic is just as disturbing today as it was when it was first published. The novel is narrated through the eyes of literature professor Humbert Humbert, a man obsessed with girls, or what he calls "nymphets." Humbert's fixation finds an outlet in 12-year-old Lolita. What follows is a twisted love affair, including a marriage between Humbert and Lolita's mother (so Humbert can stay close to his Lo), sexual relations between Humbert and the young girl, and later, the addition of another older man who longs for Lolita, which leads to a violent confrontation between the man and Humbert. The novel is one of the giants of 20th century fiction, and 60 years later, it's still shocking.

Question: Which character in Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel is obsessed with Lolita?
Answer: Humbert Humbert